"Two people," said Esmeer, "who've planned to be a power--in an original way.And by Jove! they've done it!"I did not for some time pick out Oscar Bailey, and then Esmeer showed him to me in elaborately confidential talk in a corner with a distinguished-looking stranger wearing a ribbon.Oscar had none of the fine appearance of his wife; he was a short sturdy figure with a rounded protruding abdomen and a curious broad, flattened, clean-shaven face that seemed nearly all forehead.He was of Anglo-Hungarian extraction, and I have always fancied something Mongolian in his type.He peered up with reddish swollen-looking eyes over gilt-edged glasses that were divided horizontally into portions of different refractive power, and he talking in an ingratiating undertone, with busy thin lips, an eager lisp and nervous movements of the hand.
People say that thirty years before at Oxford he was almost exactly the same eager, clever little man he was when I first met him.He had come up to Balliol bristling with extraordinary degrees and prizes capturned in provincial and Irish and Scotch universities--and had made a name for himself as the most formidable dealer in exact fact the rhetoricians of the Union had ever had to encounter.
From Oxford he had gone on to a position in the Higher Division of the Civil Service, I think in the War Office, and had speedily made a place for himself as a political journalist.He was a particularly neat controversialist, and very full of political and sociological ideas.He had a quite astounding memory for facts and a mastery of detailed analysis, and the time afforded scope for these gifts.The later eighties were full of politico-social discussion, and he became a prominent name upon the contents list of the NINETEENTH CENTURY, the FORTNIGHTLY and CONTEMPORARY chiefly as a half sympathetic but frequently very damaging critic of the socialism of that period.He won the immense respect of every one specially interested in social and political questions, he soon achieved the limited distinction that is awarded such capacity, and at that I think he would have remained for the rest of his life if he had not encountered Altiora.
But Altiora Macvitie was an altogether exceptional woman, an extraordinary mixture of qualities, the one woman in the world who could make something more out of Bailey than that.She had much of the vigour and handsomeness of a slender impudent young man, and an unscrupulousness altogether feminine.She was one of those women who are waiting in--what is the word?--muliebrity.She had courage and initiative and a philosophical way of handling questions, and she could be bored by regular work like a man.She was entirely unfitted for her sex's sphere.She was neither uncertain, coy nor hard to please, and altogether too stimulating and aggressive for any gentleman's hours of ease.Her cookery would have been about as sketchy as her handwriting, which was generally quite illegible, and she would have made, I feel sure, a shocking bad nurse.Yet you mustn't imagine she was an inelegant or unbeautiful woman, and she is inconceivable to me in high collars or any sort of masculine garment.But her soul was bony, and at the base of her was a vanity gaunt and greedy! When she wasn't in a state of personal untidiness that was partly a protest against the waste of hours exacted by the toilet and partly a natural disinclination, she had a gypsy splendour of black and red and silver all her own.And somewhen in the early nineties she met and married Bailey.
I know very little about her early years.She was the only daughter of Sir Deighton Macvitie, who applied the iodoform process to cotton, and only his subsequent unfortunate attempts to become a Cotton King prevented her being a very rich woman.As it was she had a tolerable independence.She came into prominence as one of the more able of the little shoal of young women who were led into politico-philanthropic activities by the influence of the earlier novels of Mrs.Humphry Ward--the Marcella crop. She went "slumming" with distinguished vigour, which was quite usual in those days--and returned from her experiences as an amateur flower girl with clear and original views about the problem--which is and always had been unusual.She had not married, I suppose because her standards were high, and men are cowards and with an instinctive appetite for muliebrity.She had kept house for her father by speaking occasionally to the housekeeper, butler and cook her mother had left her, and gathering the most interesting dinner parties she could, and had married off four orphan nieces in a harsh and successful manner.After her father's smash and death she came out as a writer upon social questions and a scathing critic of the Charity Organisation Society, and she was three and thirty and a little at loose ends when she met Oscar Bailey, so to speak, in the CONTEMPORARY REVIEW.The lurking woman in her nature was fascinated by the ease and precision with which the little man rolled over all sorts of important and authoritative people, she was the first to discover a sort of imaginative bigness in his still growing mind, the forehead perhaps carried him off physically, and she took occasion to meet and subjugate him, and, so soon as he had sufficiently recovered from his abject humility and a certain panic at her attentions, marry him.
